Read Online Finder's Keeper by Vivi Andrews - Free Book Online Page B

mouth if there were any justice in the world. Mia resisted the urge to yank the lollipop out of his mouth and smack him with it until his oh-so-pretty face was bruised with sugary smudges.
    She’d give him five minutes. Then she was going home to ransack her house again. There had to be a better way to find the watch.

Chapter Seven
    Captain Jack’s Surfer Punk
    “What happens now? Do you need the last known location to begin your search?”
    Chase rolled the sucker from one cheek to the other, clacking it against his teeth along the way—just because he knew it would annoy her. “I’m not a bloodhound, sugar. I’m a finder.”
    Her prissy mouth pursed into a tight knot. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”
    “It means you think real hard about what you want and why you want it, and I find it.” He snapped his fingers. “Poof.”
    “Poof,” she repeated dismally, rubbing a hand across her flat stomach. “Do you have any Tums?”
    Chase snorted back a laugh. “I’m sensing a certain lack of faith in my methods.”
    “Can we just get this over with?”
    “No problem. We’ll skip the foreplay and just get nasty.”
    “Oh, good Lord,” she groaned.
    Chase grinned. He knew he should be playing it straight, pretending he had even a passing relationship with professionalism, but she was just so much fun to wind up. He extended a hand, palm up. She looked at it as if he was offering her the plague. “You have to take my hand,” he prompted.
    With a visible display of reluctance, she slid her small, soft palm across his. His hands were smooth, polished by salt water and sand, and her skin was just as smooth. Long, slim fingers rested tentatively against the pad of his thumb. He’d never really thought of himself as a hand man, but hers were gorgeous. And freezing.
    “Christ, your hands are like ice.”
    “Poor circulation. Now what?”
    He was an idiot. Waxing poetic on her hands instead of doing his damn job. Chase sighed. “Just think about why you want the watch. There might be some thought transference, but I won’t pry any more than absolutely necessary.” He tightened his grip on her fingers so she wouldn’t pull back and opened up the part of him where his gift lived.
    Instantly, a fog of intangibles swamped him, pouring from her into him, a cloying tangle of unsatisfied longings flavored with Mia’s unique taste, the fizzy acidic tang of a mimosa. Conclusive neural scan results…a halfway decent date for the Christening…sweet, soft baby cuddled into her shoulder…acceptance from her mother…
    Chase jerked back, snapping the link. He rubbed one hand in a circle over his sternum as if he could rub out the uncomfortable intimacy of feeling her deepest desires. The intangibles were the things people wanted that he couldn’t find—because they couldn’t be found. They were the background noise he tried to ignore as he searched for the connection to the missing object, but the intangibles weren’t usually so loud. Or so clear. Fuck .
    He needed to apologize for invading her most private thoughts—that should not have happened—but she was glaring at him, arms folded tightly, skepticism radiating off her. “Well?”
    Chase swallowed thickly, for once struggling for words. “I couldn’t get a lock on it.”
    Mia rolled her eyes so hard she nearly fell over. “Of course you couldn’t.”
    Her accusation snapped him out of the strange place her most private thoughts had thrown him. He frowned down at her. “Don’t blame me, sweetheart. You were the one who wasn’t even bothering to think of it.”
    “Yes, I was!”
    “Stop it. You aren’t even a good liar.”
    The death glare was back. “I don’t see what difference it makes what I think about.”
    “I told you it made a difference. You have to focus. You have to want it badly. More than you want anything else in that moment.”
    “I do want it.”
    “Not badly enough.”
    “I can’t believe you’re trying to make your